What is Wrong With This Picture?
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What is Wrong With This Picture? is a game often found in children's magazines or books in which a picture of an otherwise normal scene contains some unusual elements not typically found in that setting, or in reality. For example, the picture could be of a school bus, with "wrong" elements including one window containing a fishbowl instead of a child's head and bus wheels of donuts or pizza. The viewer is challenged to identify the full list of "wrong" things.
The phrase What's wrong with this picture? is used sarcastically to draw attention to the fact that a situation has something glarily wrong with it. Example: "The President says he supports our troops, but he wants to cut veterans' benefits. What's wrong with this picture?"
The children's game has inspired a surrealist version in which the players take turns writing what is "wrong" with a picture, typically a photograph reproduced in a mass-circulation magazine. The answers are usually generated automatically.
What is Wrong With This Picture? got a new meaning on the Internet after the appearance of a widely spread Flash applet [1] (http://www.martectx.de/whatswrong.swf). The applet itself disguised itself as a simple picture of a room, inviting the viewer to look for errors or things out of place - however, there were no errors at all, which made most of the viewers look closer and closer to the monitor. After 30 seconds, a picture of a distorted head flashed in with a loud scream in the background, causing a considerable shock to most victims. Some pages carrying the prank actually tell the viewer to turn up the volume to hear clues, thereby enhancing the scream even more.
After the original, many clones appeared (even though they are all addressed by surfers as "whatswrong"'s), varying in levels of both volume, severity and disguise - some only displayed mild images like photo-manipulated rodents, while others went farther and placed pictures of corpses as the "shock picture"; some disguised themselves as simple games like Pong, others showed off optical illusions.
However, the most notorius "whatswrong" was a German TV commercial for K-Fee, a type of canned coffee: the imagery showed calm and quiet places like beaches or mountainside meadows, accompanied by quiet music. The "shockers" in these cases were mostly zombie-like heads, accompanied by a very loud (and audibly distorted) scream, followed by the slogan of the product: "So wach warst du noch nie." ("You were never so awake.")